Talking About Fireside Fiction's #BlackSpecFic Reports, Part 1 of 2

This third of a four part series about the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s decision to admit independently published writers talks about the first wave of independent members and SFWA’s efforts to add value for those members. Here is Part One: History of the Organization and Part Two: Bringing in the Indies.

Swinging the Doors Open to Independent Writers

The doors opened on March 1, 2015 and SFWA Executive Director Kate Baker was standing by to process and admit our new folks. This gave us a chance to observe the new criteria that the Board had been working on for so long in action with a mind for what sort of refinements might be necessary further on down the line in order to make SFWA even more welcoming to independent and small press writers.

I was glad we’d prepped the message boards. The new forums were immediately put to use and introductions made, with plenty of delighted welcomes. There was – in my perception – no contention, only enthusiasm.

Here’s a videocast M.C.A. Hogarth did aimed at indie writers evaluating whether or not to try SFWA:

Some statistics for the number-minded:

• We admitted twelve new members in that first wave, and there’s been a steady influx since. At the same time, existing members that had independent published experience felt more empowered to step forward and share their knowledge.
• According to the recent membership survey, 14.10% of the current membership identifies as indie, with another 37.57% considering themselves hybrid.
• Only a small percentage (less than 5%) derives more than 50% of their income from crowdfunding.

All My Expectations of Indie SFWA Members Confirmed
As I and others had argued repeatedly, the change did not result in an influx of unqualified, affluent hobbyists trying to buy their way into SFWA, and we could, finally, put that particular straw man to rest and play taps while other straw folk were being assembled in the background.

As you can see by the numbers, it wasn’t a massive surge, but a solid number. For some people it was part of a lifelong dream. For others, it was a cautious exploration of just what SFWA had to offer them. More than anything else, these were pragmatic, working writers. In a thread on the discussion boards, people began to share their sales number in a revelatory and instructive way that emphasized what a smart move for SFWA this had been. I still inist one of the smartest moves that happened during my time with the board.

I kept meeting new members at cons, to my pleasure and delight. We began to offer more SFWA-focused programming at conventions, such as a panel about What SFWA Offers at GenCon, Norwescon, the Nebulas (that was a no-brainer), and others.

Unexpected Results from the Indie Wave

• We found we’d done something groundbreaking without realizing it: become the first organization to allow crowdfunded projects to qualify. The question of net versus had been a subject of much discussion during the Board’s conversation, to the point where the overall category was in jeopardy, so I was happy to discover pushing to keep it alive had been useful.
• Rarely did people have to combine sales in order to prove they’d hit the 3k in one year mark. Instead it was usually a question of “Do you want my sales from Amazon or Kobo? (or something else).
• A delightful surge of volunteers and new energy should have been expected, but it took me by surprise nonetheless.

New Members Benefits — And Vice Versa
With that surge in volunteer energy came a lot of new stuff, primarily driven by Vice President Maggie Hogarth. People entered wanting to not just to connect with other members but to add their energy to the organization and help it grow to meet their needs.

Among them:

• The New Release Newsletter. Taken from the description: “The newsletter goes out every two months, and feature science fiction and fantasy new back-list re-releases from SFWA members, including books, stories, games, and other creations.” (SFWA members can sign up for it here. Releases that are announced should be from the month before or the month after the newsletter goes out.) That newsletter goes out to close to 1000 subscribers and has an above-average open rate.
• The Partners Program has been more successful in some areas than others, but overall it’s tried to build connections with industry contacts. Particularly successful ones include BookBub, HumbleBundle, Kickstarter, Kobo, and Storybundle. Today we launch one of the results of that, the second Storybundle we’ve done, this time the SFWA Fantasy Bundle (that link will go live Wednesday morning!). The Sci-Fi bundle earlier this year netted each of its writers a nice chunk of money, around $900, along with the curator’s payment, an equivalent amount which I donated to SFWA, as I’ll do again with this one. Next year our Self-Publishing Committee will take over running this program, and there will be three bundles altogether.
• The Netgalley Program was a long long time coming and something I don’t know would have happened without Maggie lending her voice to insist this was something useful for our members, but it’s now something people frequently ask me about. I stole the idea from Broad Universe, which was to buy a membership that our members could use for individual books for a substantially cheaper cost than getting such a membership on their own. Here’s how to use it to promote a book.
• The SFWA Star Project was a cool effort (and remains one) but it’s been a bit of an uneven project. Originally proposed by Rob Balder, it used a small budget to promote and support worthy crowd-funded projects. Material rewards gained by supporting a Kickstarter go to SFWA’s fundraisers to be used there.
• Expanded Nebula Programming was a natural outgrowth of the new energy, and programming tried to bring in both partners that year as well as create programming aimed at the new members. One lesson learned that first year was that the usual basic level stuff was not what people wanted, but rather in-depth looks at specific aspects of the industry and how to use SFWA’s services to the most benefit. Another was that we needed to figure out a new bookstore policy in order to accommodate everyone.

Nebula programming for the indies would be an issue both that year and the following one, with many indies feeling they were unrepresented and saying so on the discussion forums. The second year seemed to me to be partly an issue of perception and bad framing rather than actual lack: while many of the panels were aimed at indies as well as hybrid and trad pubbers, they were not marked as being of interest to indies. To my mind, they have progressed significantly each year: for me last year’s highlights included the mentoring program, the chance to hear experts talking about their wide range of expertise in office, and the fact that we managed to give everyone, including the indies, a way to have their books for sale there at the events. (Thank you Sean Wallace!)

Many existing services were already there for the new members such as the Featured Book/Artist program, the Nebula Awards, and appearances at events such as WorldCon, the Baltimore Book Festival, GenCon, and others. Other new things were applicable to all sides, such as the SFWA Speakers Bureau, introduced in early 2016 or the emerging Grants Program. I tried to make sure that indies were represented on the SFWA Recommended Reading List, and continue to do so, as do a number of other people.

All in all – things were swell, and continue to be so.

Next time, in Part Four (the final one) — what does the future hold in store? Includes talking about data from the recent SFWA member survey as well as revelation of at least one cool project designed to help people reading novels for all yearly awards, including the Nebulas, Hugos, Dragon, World Fantasy, among others. *cue mysterious music and exit*

#sfwapro

As part of a Twitter conversation, one of my favorite gamewriters, Ken St. Andre, suggested I write up something about SFWA and independent writers that goes into enough detail that people can understand why — or why not — they might want to join. This is part one of a multi-part series that will talk about some of the history behind the decision, and in this first part I want to talk about the organization prior to admitting independent writers. Part two will discuss how SFWA came to change membership criteria in order to make it possible for people to qualify for membership with indie sales in 2016, and some of the changes made as part of planning for that expansion. Part three will focus on how SFWA has changed in the intervening time, while part four will look at what I see as the changes that will continue as we move forward over the next decade. In all of this, I’m trying to provide something of an insider’s look that may or may not be useful, but certainly will be full of many words.

So what is/was SFWA, before the change? I’m going to paint in broad strokes here based on my understanding and research. (I’d love to see a book devoted to the history of SFWA at some point and one of our current projects is trying to collect that, under Vice President Erin M. Hartshorn’s direction.) The organization started in 1965 with Damon Knight organizing a number of professional genre writers in order to force publishers to treat writers better, namely pay them decent rates in a timely fashion while not taking excessive rights.

One of the first writers they helped was J.R.R. Tolkien, whose work has been pirated in the United States, Bob Silverberg said to me in email that there’s very few of those founding members left, but they included himself, Brian Aldiss, Harrison, Robert Heinlein, Kate Wilhelm and a host of distinguished others. Silverberg says Ellison as well, though the document he sent me seems to contradict that. At that time it was the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Initially SFWA was exactly what you would expect of a volunteer organization run by the most chaotic, capricious, and disorganized creatures possible: science fiction writers. Stories abound, including records getting lost because someone’s cat peed on them, Jerry Pournelle inviting Newt Gingrich to be the Nebulas toastmaster and a subsequent heated brouhaha that included some people walking out of the ceremony and Philip K. Dick agitating to get Stanislaw Lem expelled. My favorite remains Joe Haldeman’s account of the SFWA finances being somewhere in the realm of $2.67 when he became SFWA treasurer; he bought the notebook to keep track of them out of his own pocket.

The membership requirements were proof of a professional sale. Over time the memberships would expand, allowing associate members to join with a story sale, bringing in publishing professionals as associate members, and introducing estate and family memberships. The question of requalification – making members prove at intervals that they were still producing — was raised more than once, usually with plenty of heated discussion — but never implemented.

Along the way, SFWA grew and became an organization that did what its founders had envisioned, and more. Under Jerry Pournelle’s leadership, the Emergency Medical Fund, which helps writers with medical emergencies affecting their ability to to write, was implemented. A similar fund for legal situations followed. Ann Crispin and Victoria Strauss launched Writer Beware under SFWA’s auspices and began the fight to keep new writers aware of unscrupulous editors, publishers, and agents.

The fight to keep writers from being preyed upon remained a focus for SFWA. In 2004, a group of SFWAns, under the direction of James D. Macdonald, wrote Atlanta Nights in order to expose the unscrupulous practices of PublishAmerica. The book, deliberately constructed to be unpublishable, featured two identical chapters, a chapter of computer-generated gibberish, missing chapters, and a list of characters whose names spelled out the phrase “PublishAmerica is a vanity press”. It was accepted for publication by the company, which withdrew the acceptance after the hoax was revealed.

Another focus would be an effort unsurprising for a group of writers: establishing a set of awards, the Nebulas. While that may seem a bit cynical on my part, I’ll point much less cynically to the effect of the awards: the recognition of some of the best and most interesting F&SF over the years via a prestigious award group that has grown to include screenplays and Middle Grade/Young Adult Fiction as well as recognizing achievements in the field via the Kate Wilhelm Solstice award and the SFWA Grand Mastership.

Other good stuff that SFWA took on or did over the decades included a publisher audit that helped draw attention to auditing practices, started the SFWA Bulletin, a public-facing magazine aimed at educating and informing professional F&SF writers, and many efforts that started, worked for a while, and then died a graceful (sometimes less so) death when the volunteer driving them lost interest, died, or got fed up with SFWA.

Those membership requirements continued to change over the years, usually to reflect inflation. (To a degree. I’ve calculated that if we matched the buying power of the original rate, we’d be looking at closer to 20, 25 cents per word than the current 6.) The Science Fiction part was expanded to include Fantasy.

Over the decades, SFWA communications took multiple forms. The paper Forum was intended only for members and featured a letter column that was often lively in pre-Internet days. As the Internet grew in popularity, that shifted. The message boards were originally hosted on Compuserve and later moved to SFF.net, where they gained a name for being acerbic, nasty, and often contentious to the point where, when I joined, I was warned not to visit them. When I did, I found them considerably less heated than had been described, and not actually full of epic levels of bon mots, clever insults, and sundry literary feuds, somewhat to my disappointment. The SFWA Handbook appeared in multiple forms, compiling articles of interest to working F&SF writers. The SFWA Bulletin became SFWA’s outward facing publication, publishing not just what SFWA was doing, but articles of interest to all genre writers.

During Russell Davis’s term as SFWA President, Davis did something that would radically affect the direction of the organization: began the move towards reincorporation as a 501c nonprofit in California. The organization had originally been incorporated in Massachusetts, which meant there were restrictions that included having to use paper ballots for elections rather than being able to use electronic means. I will confess here that when the advantages of it all have been explained to me in the past, my eyes glaze over a bit, so I may not be the best person to speak to all of the motivations.

I joined SFWA in early 2006 but did not do much with the organization, as an associate member with a short story sale to Chizine. I found the message board system unwelcoming and generally once I’d joined, I figured I’d checked that box off my writerly bingo card and could now move onto something else.

However, I got asked to volunteer for a group assembled after an incident where a bunch of files got pulled from Scribd, including a number whose rights-holders did not want them pulled. That was an interesting group and I learned a lot about copyright as a result. I also served on a jury for the Nebula award for short story; our job was to put one thing on the ballot that we thought would otherwise get overlooked. My impression of SFWA was, I think, like most members: I didn’t think much about what the board was doing and I took advantage of some of the SFWA offerings, like the SFWA suite at conventions, the local reading series, and reading the Bulletin.

In 2012, I was asked if I’d take over as head moderator of the SFWA discussion boards, which had moved away from SFF.net onto the SFWA website. I had been the moderator of an often contentious discussion board for a game community as well as a BBS, and so I felt reasonably comfortable taking on the role. What I didn’t foresee was how that role would change my relationship to the organization, making me much more aware of its internal workings. And then, Steven Gould spoke with me in 2014 and asked if I’d consider running for Vice President. It was an interesting time in SFWA’s history, I liked the people, and so I said yes.

In Part Two, I’ll talk about the discussion and process by which SFWA came to admit independent writers. #sfwapro